Embracing Efficiency with the Arc Browser — Part I
If you are like me, you probably use the web for a variety of purposes, and you probably look for more intuitive and more productive work flows. Then you might want to check out Arc, a new browser that has been growing in popularity with good reason.
I admit that I love trying out new tools in the hope that they can make my life easier and make me more productive. I’m also fond of using tools that are elegantly designed.
I have been using Arc regularly since November 2022. It’s been my main browser since the beginning, and it’s improved significantly since then.
In this article I touch on the top three features that have made me stay with Arc. In the second part I’m going to touch on its other cool differentiators. Please let me know if your favorite browser offer similar ones, or if some extensions provide the same functionality.
I also have to admit that a browser is a special tool/application. I use it regularly at work and in my personal life. So any improvements in there could mean non-negligible gains for me. I imagine most of you are in a similar situation.
Additionally, a minor goal of mine was to reduce some of the browser extensions that I had used, especially the tab managers.
Tab Management
Let’s start with tab management, which is some/most people’s top struggle.
Technically Arc doesn’t do tab management, because, visually, Arc doesn’t represent the websites that you visit as tabs (assuming that they have been called tabs because of the traditional physical tabbed file folders). But let me continue to call them tabs for simplicity’s sake.
Unlike other major browsers, Arc has a left sidebar where you see your tabs. You can leave it pinned to the side, or hide it so that it pops out when you hover your cursor near the left edge of the Arc’s window.
At this point you might be thinking that this is just like the bookmark bar in other browsers. Yes and no. Because there are important differences.
Regarding tab management, Arc’s sidebar has three main sections:
On the top we have the Favorites.
Here I set the sites that I visit the most. Not only that I get to see them as buttons with their favicons for quick access, but those sites also become accessible using a shortcut, Cmd + # (where # is the number of the button).
You can set up to 12 favorites, which are represented as 3 rows of 4 buttons.
Below the Favorites are two sections that follow a simple but powerful idea:
When you open a web page, it starts its life at the bottom section. Arc calls this section Today. If you don’t close that page, and if you don’t move it to the upper section, it’s archived when it reaches a threshold set in the settings (the default is 12 hours).
Don’t be afraid! Technically, you don’t lose anything, because they are archived, and at any time, you can go to your archive and see the list of the archived pages. But those pages that you haven’t looked at for some time don’t end up cluttering your side bar unnecessarily.
The middle section is a static list of links that you can organize using a folder structure. This one works just like a bookmark bar. The webpages that you “pin” here remain here. Here, Arc has simple features that I enjoy using such as “replacing the pinned URL with the current one”, which replaces multiple clicks and key strokes with a single action.
Another functionality that I regularly use is renaming a tab. It is particularly useful in the static part where the links are relatively long-lived.
By default the name of the tab is the title of the web page that the URL points to. But a title of your choosing might better represent that link to you.
Below, I opened https://useinsider.com and selected to rename the link.
I renamed it to “Insider”, which helps me recognize it with ease:
Spaces
Spaces is another big reason why I use Arc.
Other browsers have similar functionality. Chrome has profiles and tab groups, and Firefox has containers (as far as I remember Firefox removed its tab groups feature a few years ago, but you can always use multiple windows to achieve the same thing). But Arc’s approach is more intuitive.
Here’s a very simple use case, which I hope would resonate with you:
You have a personal GMail account, and everything that comes with it: Calendar, Drive etc. Additionally, your company uses GSuite, so you also have a professional Google profile.
Arc lets you create profiles and assign one or multiple spaces to any of your profiles. And it does this with a minimum of friction. I find its design very intuitive. You don’t need additional windows.
Assigning a color scheme to each space creates a visual cue to distinguish them quickly. They are also accessible using a keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + # so it’s never a hassle to switch between them.
For example, to capture the pictures I’m using in this article, I’ve created a different space and I’ve assigned it to one of my existing profiles. Once I’m done with this work, I’m going to get rid of it.
And as you can guess, I have a professional profile with its single space (with its own side bar). I have multiple spaces assigned to my personal profile. I also have a space for my YouTube channel using a different profile, etc.
Arc offers the most intuitive and effective space and profile management I’ve used so far.
Moving Tabs Around
You may be wondering how easy it is to move a tab from one space to another.
Below is an example.
I selected a pinned tab, which was in my Demo space. And I moved it to the Pinned section of my Work space. I could have as easily moved it to another section, such as Favorites or Today.
Air Traffic Control
Imagine Arc is your default browser, and you clicked on a link that a colleague sent you. It’s a Jira link that opens a recent bug. But you use Jira through your professional profile in your Work space. How do you tell Arc to automatically open all Jira links in the right space? (I’m going to touch on the manual way of doing this in Part II).
Arc’s Air Traffic Control allows you to do just that.
Using Air Traffic Control panel, you can set rules for a URL to open in a selected space (as of this writing, there are two rules: “contains” and “is equal to”).
In the above example I told Arc to open all URLs routed to Arc that contain “amzn.co” in my personal space.
Other Important Features
Don’t forget to check out Part II where I touch on some other cool features that I enjoy such as Little Arc or Split Windows.
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